Here's What the New MacBook Pro's AMD Graphics Can Do

Apple's all-new MacBook Pro is here, and it's a doozy. But aside from touting a stunningly slim new design and an innovative Touch Bar, the latest MacBook is shaping up to be much more of a graphics powerhouse than its already beefy predecessors.

Apple's new high-end notebook features a choice of AMD Radeon Pro 450, 455 or 460 graphics, all of which are looking like the chipmaker's fastest GPUs yet. The new graphics chips are built on AMD's 14nm FinFET process, which essentially allows the company to cram lots of GPU power into a machine as thin as the new MacBook Pro.

The Radeon Pro 450 and 455 tout a peak performance of up to 1 and 1.3 teraflops, respectively, while the high-end 460 maxes out at 1.86 teraflops. That means that the new 15-inch MacBook Pros are significantly more powerful than the 13-inch, Iris Graphics-based models (up to 845 gigaflops), and almost as powerful as the D300 FirePro GPU found on Apple's Mac Pro desktop (2 teraflops per GPU).

This improved graphical power complements a new MacBook Pro that's almost completely redesigned. The new notebook gets as slim as 14.9mm for the 13-inch model, and weighs as little as 3 pounds. But the real selling point is the Touch Bar: an interactive strip above the keyboard that lets you do things such as access app shortcuts, quickly flip between browser tabs or simply find the perfect emoji to send to a friend.

The MacBook Pro's specs are certainly promising, and we look forward to putting the notebook through our usual graphics benchmarks to see how it stacks up to the competition. Stay tuned.

A devout gamer and tech enthusiast, Mike Andronico joined the Laptop team in July 2013. With a B.A. in Journalism from Purchase College and experience at GameNGuide, Examiner and 2D-X, Mike tackles everything from iPhone rumors to in-depth hardware reviews.